The college was a religious one, with a priest who is named in the first place. It is also a funerary society, and seems to be composed of freedmen and of slaves, either belonging to the colony or private masters. They had just erected a temple of their patron god, to which some had given subscriptions in money, while others made various offerings for its adornment. One brother presents an image of the god in a little shrine, another statuettes of Hercules and Mercury. There is another donation of some stone-work in front of the temple, and Hostilius, at his own expense, cut away the rock to smooth the approach to the shrine. Most of the gifts are of trifling value, a poor little picture worth 15 _denarii_, a marble image of Bacchus costing not much more. But they were the offerings of an enthusiastic brotherhood, and the good Hostilius has given them an immortality of which they never dreamed. The contributions of the members would generally have been but a sorry provision for the social and religious life of a college. Reproducing, as it did, the constitution and the tone of the city in so many traits, the college in nothing follows its model so closely as in its reliance on the generosity of patronage. At the head of the album of the society there is a list, sometimes disproportionately long, of its _patroni_. Countless inscriptions leave us in no doubt as to the reason why the patron was elected. His _raison d’être_ in the club is the same as in the city; it is to provide luxuries or amusements for the society, which the society could not generally obtain for itself. The relation of patron and client is, of all the features of ancient life, the one which, being so remote from the spirit of our democratic society, is perhaps most difficult for us to understand. The mutual obligations, enforced by a powerful traditional sentiment, were of the most binding, and sometimes burdensome character. And in that form of relation, between former master and freedman, which became so common in the first age of the Empire, the old master was bound to continue his support and protection to the emancipated slave.(1522) Although there was much that was sordid and repulsive in the position of the client in Juvenal’s and Martial’s days, we must still recognise the fact that the fortune of the rich patron had to pay a heavy price for social deference. Not less heavy was the demand made on the patrons of municipalities and colleges.